Living Environment

Introduction

• Humans have unique capacity to understand, empathize, and actively show compassion
• Buddhism encourages everyone to practice altruistic love and compassion for everyone and everything
• includes protection of animals and vegetation

Interdependence

• Dependent Origination = interconnectedness of all living species and environments
• Humans completely reply on natural world
• Desire to develop a compassionate spirit

“All human beings in the universe are equal in nature, and in this phenomenal world, the lives of all human and animals are interrelated, mutually developing and inseparable."

How Nature Influences Buddhism

Living Environment: Finding a Balance

Khoryug

("Environment")

• Buddhist monasteries exist harmoniously amongst natural-growing vegetation and native animals
• Develop a natural care and respect for the world around them
• Sense of complacency concerning the importance of protecting the natural world around us
• Using the teachings of Buddha to help educate the world

• Umbrella organization of 55 monasteries and nunneries founded by the 17th Karmapa
• India, Nepa, Bhutan (Himalayan regions)
• Promote protecting the environment and providing education to monks and nuns so they can become leaders in their communities
• Guiding others in protecting the planet and all forms of life
• One of the smallest carbon footprints
• "Compassion is action"

How Materialism Affects Living Environments

Melody Astle, Josephine Reardon, & Olivia Tzeng

"The external environment is seriously polluted because the internal environment in the mind is seriously damaged.”

- Thich Tri Quang

Humans believe we are at the top of the natural hierarchy

“I see that the issue of protecting the environment is basically an issue of our mind. How human beings act is based on their motivation, so the environmental issue is a mental issue; it is based on how we see things...Our desire is just like this: It comes out from our mind, and then one desire gives rise to another and another in a continuous stream, so that our whole lives are overrun with desire. We live in a cocoon made of our constant craving.”

-His Holiness the 17th Karmapa

We allow ourselves to take advantage of other living beings and destroy the natural world around us

We begin to buy into material desires -- negatively impacting our mental and physical living environments

Need for a Simpler Life

Conclusion

• Ask yourself: "Do I need this or not?"
• Practice of living a simple life =joyous and content-filled mind and harmonious living

• Companies bend to consumerism and materialism
• Buddhists hope to reduce the world's desire of material objects
• Balancing our outer material and our inner spiritual world
• Simple life vs. Complicated life

“We don’t have to go to extremes, making huge changes and thinking that we have to give up everything like Milarepa. We need a good situation, but a simple one, not a life complicated by always wanting more.”

- 17th Karmapa

Sources:

http://www.budsas.org/ebud/ebdha006.htm

http://karmapafoundation.eu/buddhism-environment-living-harmony-planet/

http://khoryug.info/vision/

http://fore.yale.edu/religion/buddhism/